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It’s exciting to find really good apps for your device or laptop. MacApps can be very reliable and helpful depending what you want to do with your MacBook. Beware apps which drain system resources . You can locate System Monitor in Spotlight to check which apps are heavy on system resources and would be draining your battery. Press the stop icon to stop them from running. My best cleaner for the MacBook is Onyx . It has been reliable over a number of years. The comments underneath the video mention Alfred and that is a very good app if it’s the sort of thing you want. The Mac lets you know about battery charge so I am not sure why you would want a third party one. The video lets you know about 30 good apps. You will probably know about Google Drive and Evernote but here are 28 other apps worth considering which you might not know about.

Have to confess I laughed at the phone in the cup which quickly upgraded to a phone and 2 cups. Not really 21st century and not very suave! Happy with my clock radio alarm, thank you. The other hacks are pretty helpful and even downright useful. Many of them apply to a MacBook but I tried the fast forward and rewind keys for YouTube on my Dell laptop running Linux and it works a treat. What a great idea. I often need to wind through YouTube clips , so thanks for that! I hope you find a life saver in one of these hacks from UrAvgConsumer.

If you have a MacBook then using Quicktime to make screencasts is probably the best way to go because then you can import the screencasts into KeyNote or iMovie easily. All the software on a MacBook is designed to integrate. There is plenty of information about the uses of Quicktime here at iskysoft. The screen casting aspect of it is something my students use in their presentations and can embed it as a video in KeyNote/Powerpoint or they import it as a movie into iMovie and use it as part of their overall presentation. A screencast can be a very helpful way of showing somemone how to do something when you don’t want to keep repeating the instructions. It can be used to make how to videos but it can also be used in a creative way to capture a screen and what you or the screen is doing so that you can add that to a bigger task. You could take screencasts of Google Tours, for instance, and then add other information either in video or slide format. I have found if you are going to talk with a screencast you need to be very clear about what you are going to say. Some people can do that easily. Others , like me, need to think it out first and then say it. Before you start recording be very clear about what it is you want to do. You do have the option of importing it into a movie program and then recording a voiceover. I am not a natural at talking and doing something on a screen unless I am teaching. Practise! Don’t get put off. Just keep doing it.

There are a couple of typos on this video but they do not in any way impede the content. The content is clear and the person doing the clip has an effective way of presenting information in an efficient and helpful way. People struggle sometimes when they are shifting from Windows to a MacBook but a MacBook is very easy if you use Finder and Spotlight. There are other videos on YouTube which follow both of these options more fully but this video gives you a quick overview. Finder also has options on the toolbar right at the top of your desktop screen. One of the most useful things here is Go which will take you to your home folder, applications or a flash or pocket drive if you can’t easily find them. If you master Finder and Spotlight, a lot of the baffling nature of a MacBook is taken away and you feel more in control. You can also change the view, as you do in windows, so you can see lists or icons in Finder. Spotlight will find anything you type in the search box and has extra features like the dictionary too which can be handy.

There are people who can’t make a desktop folder on a MacBook because they are using the trackpad and are used to a mouse. Shift-Command-N is easy and makes the folder appear right there on your desktop. This way you can slide files into your folder and most people can do that easily with a track pad. The less you have on the desktop the better your MacBook will load and run. This video explains 3 different ways of making desktop folders and how to name them.